'Print the Legend,' First Feature-Length Documentary about 3D Printing to Premiere at SXSW

You heard it here first: "3D printing is having its 'Macintosh moment.'" So says the team behind a new full-length documentary on the subject, directors Luis Lopez and Clay Tweel and producer Steven Klein. Hollywood Reporter fills in the blank: Pettis is the Steve Jobs of the movement, a shorthand for an upstart who will bring us a product that we never knew we needed through sheer force of will. (Meanwhile, the colossal quarter that he has rendered for the website and poster features his face instead of one of our founding fathers, casting Jobs as none other than God.)

Print the Legend will premiere at SXSW Film Festival this weekend with a handful of screenings in Austin, and if the forthcoming dates are TBD, at least the press materials include a selective history of 3D printing. Between the trailer and milestones listed below, it looks like there's definitely a narrative arc to the documentary...1986: 3D Systems invents Stereolithography (SLA)—which uses a laser to cure liquid plastic in precise layers that can build up an object—to print the first 3D- printed object.

1989: Stratasys invents Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), which uses a fine- tipped "hot glue gun" on a robot arm to deposit plastic layers onto a platform that lowers in very fine increments, building up an object.

2009: In the wake of the open-source RepRap community that rises up after FDM patents start to expire, Zach Hoeken, Adam Mayer and Bre Pettis launch Thingiverse, an online repository for sharable digital designs. Zach, Adam and Bre form MakerBot Industries.

Here's some exciting news: The U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory is currently working on a 3D printer "that is 200 to 500 times faster and capable of printing polymer components 10 times larger than today's common additive machines—in sizes greater than one cubic meter." To do it...

Once upon a time bicycles were made from tube stock. These days it seems they may go 3D-printed. But until they get there, there are guys like California-based Brent Foes, whose Foes Racing USA company uses a hybrid of old and new technologies, like having a waterjet cut aluminum sheets...

Growing up, you couldn't get cooler or more stylish than wearing something you created yourself. Proof: I had a short run as a seamstress of sorts after my high school peers saw the pair of ripped denim I brought back to life with a few obnoxiously bright scraps of fabric....

About nine months ago, we got a first look at a freely articulating 3D printer, developed by Joris Laarman Lab in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC). By extruding a special fast-curing resin with a multi-jointed robotic arm, MATAERIAL proposed a "radically new 3D printing method,"...